The Printers' International Specimen Exchange
Subtitle: “With an Introduction by the Editor of the Paper and Printing Trades' Journal [A. W. Tuer]”
Start Date(s)
End Date(s)
- 1898 (Stewart)
- 1896 (Shattock)
Editor(s)
City
Type of Content
• "Circulated a selection of various printers' best designs and typography as technical models and inspiration for its subscribers. As each copy consisted of 200 hand-mounted examples, this project was no doubt made viable by Tuer's ‘Stickphast’ glue, which he had invented at the end of the 1860s" (ODNB, Peltz)Notes
- "In some interesting and characteristic communications from Mr. Ruskin on the subject of the Printers' International Specimen Exchange he writes: 'I assure you again how gladly I hear of an association of printers who will sometimes issue work in a form worthy of their own craft and shewing to the uttermost the best of which it is capable. It seems to me also that a lovely field of design is open in the treatment of decorative type, not in the mere big initials in which one cannot find the letters but in delicate and variably fantastic ornamentation of capitals, and filling of blank spaces or musically divided periods of sentences and breadths of margin. Paper that won't break or won't mildew would be literally a 'godsend' to me. I scarcely care to design an engraving to go on to modern paper. I have the most entire sympathy with your objects, but believe that people will have had paper nowadays, bad printing nowadays, and bad painting nowadays and nothing else. The public have, perhaps almost without knowing it, the technical education of printers at heart, for good typography concerns every man, woman, and child who can read. Printers would do well to recollect that in technically educating themselves they are educating the masses for printing is closely allied to the fine arts, and by the production of better work the national taste is elevated and society at large benefitted" ("Introduction," vol. 1, 1880, p. 5)
- "The Printers' International Specimen Exchange was established in England in 1880. Organised by the typographer, Andrew White Tuer, editor of the Paper and printing trades journal. Each subscriber at a cost of one shilling provided a certain number of typographic specimens representing their best work. These were then collected into sets so that each subscriber received 200 incoming specimens, all different, in place of his own 200 outgoing specimens, all the same" (Jury qtd. in COPAC)
- Publisher's address: 50 Leadenhall St (journal itself)
- "An interesting collection of 'jobbing display' material by English, French, German, and other European printers of the second half of the nineteenth century. Instructive for the student of style and design" (Ulrich 24)
Subject Categories
Sources that Discuss this Journal
- Shattock 52; 3:604; 24, 47, 133, 186; passim
Works Cited
- Shattock, Joanne. The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Vol. 4: 1800-1900. Edited by Frederick W. Bateson. 3rd ed. Cambridge UP. 1999.
